The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the most important collection of Lithuanian photography outside the country today, a selection of which will be presented in the exhibition ‘The Forms of Things, The Forms of Skulls, Forms of Love’ at Paris Photo.
The Eye of Photography spoke to Dominique Versavel, curator of modern photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, to find out more about the history of this incredible collection.
The creation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s collection of Lithuanian photography is above all a story of friendship. When, in the late 1960s, the Cabinet des Estampes decided to expand its collections of contemporary photography on an international scale, Jean-Claude Lemagny was appointed to the task. He was in charge of contemporary photography between 1968 and 1996.
Until then, the BnF had focused primarily on France, but now it was opening up to the rest of the world and adding prints from America, Asia and Europe to its reserves. Eastern Europe was a real challenge: in the 1970s, the world was divided into blocs. East of the Iron Curtain contacts were far from easy. Despite this, Lemagny managed to build up a network of professionals from museums, festivals and photographic magazines. While he managed to put together a body of work covering all the countries of Eastern Europe, he also established a special relationship with Lithuania.
Present in Moscow in 1972 for the major photographic exhibition ‘Faces of France’, Lemagny had a decisive encounter with Antanas Sutkus. A great name in Lithuanian photography, he had just founded the Lithuanian Society of Photographic Art, whose members included another young photographer, Aleksandras Macijauskas. It was Macijauskas who was to act as intermediary between Lithuania and France.
Lemagny and Macijauskas began a correspondence that would last several decades and lead, between 1970 and 1990, to the building of a collection of over 1,700 prints by dozens of photographers, including: Aleksandras Macijauskas, Alfonsas Budvytis, Algimantas Kunčius, Algirdas Šeškus, Vitalijus Butyrinas, Antanas Sutkus, Rimaldas Vikšraitis, Romualdas Rakauskas, Violeta Bubelytė, Vitas Luckus, Romualdas Požerskis, Julius Vaicekauskas, Virgilijus Sonta, Vytautas Stanionis and others.
In terms of quantity, Aleksandras Macijauskas was the biggest donor, with almost 700 prints, including his series on farmers’ markets, in which he exaggerates faces with close-ups, and another series on veterinary clinics, in which the photographer brings together humans and animals through once again rather daring points of view. As Dominique Versavel points out, this type of series is fairly characteristic of Lithuanian humanist photography: unlike the French movement, where representation was fairly straightforward, the Lithuanians, despite their focus on social reportage, made more marked formal choices.
While this collection focuses on the humanist vein of Lithuanian photography from the 1950s to the 1980s and 1990s, it also includes more conceptual works such as the self-portraits of Violeta Bubelytė, one of the few women photographers of this generation. The poetic dimension was also very important, as evidenced by Romualdas Rakauskas’s sensitive photographs of flourishing trees or Algimantas Kuncius’s Reminiscences series, a contemplative and somewhat melancholy return to various places in his life.
Surprisingly, Jean-Claude Lemagny never visited Lithuania. The collection was built up mainly through letters. Photographers sent in their publications. From these pages, Lemagny selected the photographs that were to go into the BnF’s reserves. He received them a few months later in envelopes.
The letters exchanged with Aleksandras Macijauskas reveal both passionate discussions about photography and the birth of a friendship. And while Lemagny discovered Lithuanian photographic creation through their correspondence, he also gave these photographers access to what was being done in the world at the time, by sending Robert Frank’s latest publications, for example: this great collection was built on mutual enrichment.
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